Jill Domschot

I’ve had this blog for many years now — since about 2008, albeit it has gone through a number of iterations. It also started out as a blogspot url, but that’s irrelevant information caused by a sudden spate of reminiscing about my romantic first endeavors with the blog; by romantic, I mean they were heady days when I wrote about history (18th C) and books and waited patiently for my first blog comment. This was before I was on Facebook or Twitter.

Blogger was it in those days, and I had no idea how to attract people to my site. I never really learned, to be honest. However, every time I’ve let it lapse, I’ve picked it up again because it’s my space to write, an open and public space, unlike Facebook. Thus, I won’t beat myself up about how busy I was over the fall semester, enough so that I dropped this old blog like a hot rock. I can pick it up now, if I so choose.

To give an update on my life, the busy fall led into the holidays, which then led into a serious funk I haven’t quite recovered from. It’s still there, caused by the start to a new year and not finishing all I’d set out to accomplish over 2019. I began asking myself what the point was to having all these life goals. I suspect the answer is that they’re inherently meaningful, but it’s difficult to convince the brain of that when it comes to doing work without a fixed, known payoff. Does anything have a fixed, known payoff? No. But there are more direct lines to success than writing books or creating paintings or sculpting statues on spec. The writing career wasn’t the only problem, though. I simply lost interest in all the things that I used to enjoy — reading, exercising, going to church (more on that in a minute), even walking the dog. I’ve been there before; it’s impossible to maintain a high level of interest in life at all times. I suppose I suffer from being too curious most of the time, which leads to burnout.

Habits are easy to make and difficult to break. Thus, I will slowly work my way to folding in more than 1000 words to my habit. I would like to post here more often, for example. I also have my cyber-punk break-dancing story I’d like to bring back from the grave, along with a book of short stories I’ve loosely titled Finding Jesus. I don’t mean for this to be a gospel tract type of book — I’m not even sure why I decided to call it that. It was inspired by a story I tried to write as 2019’s Christmas tale (it was too dark to hand out to family), which was about a man who’d grown up in a Christian home where his parents allowed him to be sexually molested as a child. The story is about his adult sexual fantasies and combatting them and eschewing evil. I know. Some Christmas story. That’s what all the stories are about, people who already know the gospel but “find Jesus” by turning away from darkness, such as the outright evil of pedophilia to abject pride. They aren’t morality tales, per se. Well, they might be a little bit. More so, they’re character-driven stories with a literary flair about human struggles. There was a time when literary stories were obsessed with dark subjects such as incest or pedophilia; my stories are along those lines, except they don’t dwell in postmodern darkness, but in the objective right and goodness that still exist in the universe.

Now to return to the subject of church. Losing joy in church is inevitable. Anything that’s practiced by rote becomes rote. On the other hand, I was actively going to Mass and then a Protestant church service with my family. I got burnt out on this exhausting combination rather than the churches individually. I still enjoy Mass because it’s quiet and reflective. I don’t know what to do about the latter, though it’s not much of an issue right now, as my family is burnt out on church, too. So I will continue to go to Mass. And that brings me to my final update: I will finally be confirmed in the Catholic church this Easter season. It’s finally going to happen! Perhaps 2020 will end up being a different kind of year, a year of adventures, rather than the middle-aged funk it was setting itself up to be.

In the early 1900s, the rhetoric against the suffragette movement was spot-on; one could almost say prophetic. Cartoonish images of women beating their husbands over their heads or abandoning their children to chaos were plastered on posters. I particularly like this one because it must have been a hard pill for many women to swallow:

It’s certainly not nice rhetoric, but the point wasn’t to be nice. The point was to rein society in from its continuous downward spiral. The scourge of mannish women had already long begun, and the political movement to give women the right to vote was the latest iteration of it. When only men had the right to vote, it was assumed they would be voting for the interests of their families. Giving women the right to vote would necessarily split the interests of the family; if the husbands and wives voted differently, their family votes would be neutralized. As there are more women than men in society due to female longevity, giving voting rights to women would ostensibly tip voting blocs in a different direction than the men of society might wish, thus leading to a society that is bent toward female interests. And, yes, a rather large majority of women do vote in step with each other, and their votes tend toward liberalism. There’s obviously a reason for this: liberalism brought us the feminist movement in the first place. The feminist movement brought us universal suffrage. Hence, universal suffrage is under the influence of liberalism and always has been.

While some might argue that women also vote for the interests of their family, female suffrage was not necessary except to push individual interests (which, ironically, become collectivist interests; see above). If a family representative is already voting for the interests of the family, there is no reason for another person to do this unless the person in question only cares for her own interests. Putting aside the cruel “meme” above about unwanted women becoming ugly suffragettes, it would have been perhaps smarter to grant voting rights to all heads of households, as determined by tax status, instead of wantonly giving every person over a certain age the privilege of “speaking their minds in the ballot box”. This would have given spinsters who bought or inherited property a vote for her household interests. But we’re so far past this point now it’s hardly worth discussing what would’ve been better (though far from perfect) if we’d had the same kind of forethought as those creating the anti-suffragette posters.

The slippery slope was always there; it was always real. There is no slippery slope fallacy when it comes to tearing out the cornerstones of society. I just switched metaphors, but the point still remains that things are going to come crumbling down when foundations are destroyed. Of course, there are actual slippery slope fallacies. I like to call them Handmaid’s Tale Fallacies because they’re based off fictional mental worlds that have never existed. Just look at the Suffragette Madonna! This is the reality we currently live under, when being a woman or man doesn’t uniquely bring something to the world. The image is literally happening right now; women with facial hair are giving birth to babies and proclaiming it in the news as though a woman with a womb on testosterone is somehow a miraculous being. Our modern day delusions are destroying our souls, and this poster artist predicted it over a century ago. Notice that the man is surrounded by a laurel leaf crown — a regular Apollo, uselessly chasing his love, Daphne, while she taunts him and runs away from him. Eventually, she appeals to her daddy figure to fix her Apollo problem, and he turns her into a tree. A tree. Apollo is still such a chump, though, that he vows to care for Daphne always and forever, despite her being made of wood and bearing nothing fruitful for him but the leaves he can form into a wilted crown.